This is the dumbest, most ill thought-out… actually, words fail. A national database of porn viewing habits? What could possibly go wrong? Coupled with the snooper’s charter, it’s an authoritarian’s (teflon theresa) wet dream.

Controlling access to and mapping users of porn is so much more important than preventing greedy builders and building owners from having firetraps that kill scores of their tenants. I can’t believe politicians actually try and cram this shit down people’s throats.
I wonder if Western society will completely implode before I’m dead/gone? Doubt there will be much warning.

Nothing in there about cornershops keeping a copy of your passport or indeed any mention of cornershops at all.

I’m not sure where this “porn code” idea comes from. It’s not in the consultation document and the Indy doesn’t give any source for it.

The closest it gets is “David Austin, chief executive with the BBFC, told The Daily Telegraph that such a process would be “simpler than people think” to create.”

That links to the Telegraph which is of course paywalled.

57Lh7m5gq2f04iR:

A prominent UK tabloid has a long history of scantily clad photos of women and that’s just okay

the_borderer:

Two of them in fact, and both of them have editorial policies supporting the authoritarian right.

Bytheway:

Ah… so the London Sun newspaper is will have to stop the page 3 section if this gets rammed through?

Page 3 is A-OK as far as this law is concerned. It is a) only concerned with online pr0n so the print stuff is fine, and b) pornography for the purposes of the Act is defined in various ways that all require the material to be stuff that if it were subject to BBFC classification would be at least 18 rated.

My comment was less to do with whether or not it’s okay within the confines of the law, it’s pointing out the staggering hypocrisy that says that casually objectifying women in a newspaper is A-OK, but the government needs to know if you’re looking at any of that filthy pornography.

This is because the law isn’t really about stopping pornography, but about suppressing individual freedom and forcing conservative, heteronormative, “values” on people who didn’t ask for them in order to appease the reactionaries. It is unlikely that the law will stop anyone from viewing pornography. The people behind this who know how the Internet works, know it won’t work, and nobody who thinks it will work has any idea what they’re talking about.

The real purpose is to give the UK surveillance monster even more to feed on. Every square meter of London is already covered by half a dozen cctv cameras, but Big Brother needs more, and this is just another “in” that allows for yet more egregious surveillance. They’ve been angling at this for awhile, so you can be damned sure that someone has some horrendous Machiavellian scheme in mind that depends on it.